Chapter 12 #3
“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”
“I didn’t take it as one.”
She pushed back her chair and stood, and he rose automatically, because of course he did, because even when he was entirely impossible, he had the manners of a man raised from birth to know how to behave. She found that particularly aggravating in this moment.
“I am going,” she said, with enormous dignity, “to explore the house.”
“Harold can show you—”
“Thank you, I shall find my own way.”
She left before he could say anything else that was either right or reasonable or both.
* * *
The trouble with announcing one’s intention to explore a house with independent self-possession was that it required knowing where one was going.
Saxton Castle, it turned out, had a great many corridors.
They were all beautiful, all high-ceilinged, all lined with the kind of art and furniture that spoke of significant expenditure over several generations, and they all looked broadly similar when one had arrived at them through a sequence of staircases and turns made largely on principle rather than any navigational logic.
Megan paused at a landing on what she was fairly confident was the third floor of the north wing, looked in both directions, and concluded that she had absolutely no idea which way the dining room was from here or her bedchamber for that matter. She should have asked for help.
She picked a direction and continued walking.
The corridor here differed slightly from the rest of the castle, quieter, somehow, in the way a room is quiet when it is regularly inhabited by the same person rather than maintained for general use.
The rugs were worn in familiar patterns.
The lamps were positioned where someone had always placed them.
A small table held a vase of dried flowers that must have been arranged in summer and kept because someone had loved the shape of them, and beside the vase a pair of reading spectacles sat exactly where they’d been set down and never moved.
She slowed.
At the end of the corridor there was a set of double doors, older than the surrounding architecture, their dark oak polished with the particular sheen of very old wood that had been touched every day for a very long time. And from beyond those doors came a sound.
Music.
Not performance, nothing practiced or deliberate. Just the threading, intimate sound of someone playing for themselves, one hand picking out a melody on what she thought must be a harpsichord, the notes unhurried and slightly old-fashioned and completely lovely.
Megan stood in the corridor for a moment.
Then she knocked.
The music stopped.
“Come in.” The voice was old, clear, and had the tone of someone who had expected a visitor for some time and was unsurprised to find them at the door.
Megan opened it.
The room beyond was like stepping through a membrane in time.
Where the rest of the castle was grand and formal and aggressively maintained, this was simply inhabited, deeply, comfortably, completely.
Books everywhere, not arranged for effect but stacked and opened and left face down on chairs.
A fire burned warmly, surrounded by a haphazard collection of objects: a small portrait in a battered frame, a set of miniatures arranged without any apparent system, a shawl in a color that had probably been vivid thirty years ago.
The harpsichord stood against the far wall; its lid scattered with music and other items pressed into service as paperweights.
And in the chair beside the fire sat the oldest woman Megan had ever seen.
She was small and thin and white-haired, and she sat with the particular uprightness of very old nobility, the kind that had nothing to prove to anyone and therefore sat however they liked.
Her eyes were dark and bright, and she was looking at Megan with an expression of frank, unembellished interest.
“Well,” the old woman said. “You’re not Harold.”
“No.” Megan realized she was standing in the doorway and came fully into the room. “I’m very sorry to intrude. I was—I’m afraid I got somewhat turned around in the corridors and I heard the music and…” She stopped herself. “I apologize. I’m Megan, a guest of Lord Astor. I don’t know your name.”
“That is because no one has told you it.” The old woman tilted her head with an air of assessment, every bit as sharp as the Duke’s, but warmer somehow.
The curiosity of a person who is genuinely interested in what they find rather than merely calculating its value.
“I am Dorothea. I am Oliver’s grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxton, though we do not speak of me in the formal parts of the house because my son considers me eccentric, which is simply what people call women who have outlived the requirement to manage other people’s comfort.
” She gestured to the chair across from her.
“Sit down, child. You look like someone who has recently spent a great deal of time being very brave, which is exhausting in ways that people who haven’t done it rarely understand.
I imagine you have a story to tell. I do love stories. ”
Megan crossed the room, sat down, and her chest eased in the way it hadn’t since she’d walked away from the breakfast table.
“You are not what I expected,” Dorothea said. “From the way my grandson spoke of you.”
Megan looked up. “When did he speak to you?”
“He came up last night to say he was home. He always does. Whatever hour it is. He knows I don’t sleep.
” The old woman’s dark eyes were steady and warm and absolutely direct.
“He told me he had brought a woman here from Wales. A woman of extraordinary courage. That he needed to go to London to fight for her, and that he was afraid she would not stay put while he did so.” A slight, satisfied curve of her mouth.
“He did not tell me she was beautiful with green eyes the color of sea glass, but then Oliver wouldn’t want me to know his feelings. ”
Megan found that she didn’t have an answer to any of that.
Dorothea picked up her spectacles from the small table beside her chair and settled them on her nose, regarding Megan with the look of a woman who had lived long enough to find the world consistently more interesting than it had any obligation to be.
“Hmm, interesting. You remind me of someone. I can’t remember who, but I will. Now then,” she said. “Tell me what he’s done to infuriate you. I suspect it will be one of several recurring categories, and I have opinions on all of them.”
Outside the north wing windows, the frosted grounds of Saxton Castle stretched out in the pale winter light. For the first time since she’d walked out of the dining room in high dudgeon, Megan felt the tight knot of the morning loosen.
She told her.